A comparison of Weight Watcher's Points Plus Values and SmartPoints

Given that I like to use my own software to calculate points (don't worry WW intellectual property police, I don't actually distribute the formulas — I just calculate it on my home machine), I sat down today to dig into the new Smart Points calculations. It turns out the formula is not yet on Wikipedia (in fact, the old formulas are gone — you have to dig through revision history to find them) so I had to sit down with a spreadsheet and reverse engineer the new SmartPoints formula myself.¹

As I did so, I realized the formulas gave me a chance to dig into what's behind the numbers. I'm going to present the numbers in terms of points-per-hundred-calories because that's a nice way to see how Weight Watcher's is going beyond simple calorie counting to try to nudge our behavior in certain directions.

	PPV/100 cal	SmartPoints/100 cal
Carbohydrates	2.7	3.1
Sugar	2.7	6.1
Fat	2.9	3
Saturated Fat	2.9	6.1
Protein	2.3	0.6
Alcohol*	3.1	2.7
Fiber**	-8	0

*Alcohol numbers I've inferred by creating foods w/ a calorie count but no information for other nutrients. That is to say, they could also be taken as a "generic calorie" count -- what WW gives you if you provide it calorie information but no other nutrients. WW doesn't provide an input to enter grams of alcohol into their calculators. I haven't taken the time to check my numbers against actual values for foods with alcohol in the WW database.

**Fiber has no calories of course. I've put here instead the values-per-100 grams. In PPV, grams of fiber offset points from other nutrients. In SmartPoints, as far as I can see fiber has no impact, which makes me thoroughly confused why they still include it in the nutrition calculator...

Digging in a bit more detail

You can't quite trust the above chart as an apples-to-apples comparison, because a point-plus value is not the same as a smart point.

To get a baseline comparison, I thought it would be useful to compare the PPV-per-100-calories for each nutrient to an "average" value², which I calculated to be:

Average SmartPoints/100 calories: 3.7 (or, if you prefer, 27 calories per average SmartPoint)
Average PPV/100 calories: 2.8 (or, if you prefer, 35 calories per average PPV)

I used the "average" points-per-100-calorie value to calculate the "deltas," which is to say, how WW is skewing their numbers to be different from a pure calorie counting system. Below are the differences between the PPV-per-100-calories of a nutrient and the baseline.  Values in this chart that are negative are those foods WW is incentivizing you to eat more of; the positive ones are those that are penalized, and the values give you the size of the penalty or incentive.

	PPV Delta	SmartPoint Delta
Carbohydrates	-4% (0.1)	-16% (-0.6)
Sugar	-4% (0.1)	+65% (+2.4)
Fat	+4% (0.1)	-19% (-0.7)
Saturated Fat	+4% (0.1)	+65% (+2.4)
Protein	-18% (-0.5)	-84% (-3.1)
Alcohol*	-4% (-0.1)	-16% (-0.6)

*Alcohol numbers should be taken with a heavy grain of salt — see above.

So, what does all this mean?

Well, it makes it clear what WW has set out to do: help us eat less sugar and saturated fat, and get us eating more protein. I have no idea how strong the science is supporting those recommendations, but those are the recommendations they're making. My own not-that-informed sense is that there is strong consensus on the recommendations against added sugars and saturated fat. I'm not at all sure how much sense it makes to be eating protein as much as they seem to be pushing. We may all be eating like the Rock soon if we follow this advice.

I think WW does a good job tilting our hands in the right direction, but we have to be careful not to try to game the system too much. In the end, there's probably some truth to the idea that a calorie is a calorie, and I have great faith in my own ability to overeat even when adhering to the healthiest of food choices (I have faith I could get fat eating anything... I just love food too much).

One thing that concerns me is how much stronger the "tilt" is with the new points. If you look at the deltas above, you'll see that with points-plus, you were pretty close to counting calories, with a slight tilt of the formula toward lean proteins and fiber. With the new SmartPoints, the skew is much more dramatic, and that's not something I love.

Two reasons I did WW instead of trying Atkins or South Beach or Paleo or any of the other trendy diets is that (1) I wanted to be able to keep eating real food of all varieties and more importantly (2) I have great faith in my ability to overeat any food category; I don't have one "weak point" when it comes to this stuff; it's all a weak point. For that reason, I'm worried that if WW is relying more on skewing our food choices toward certain categories and away from others, they could end up moving closer to a trendy diet and further from what I've always valued about the program: rather than a particular diet, WW always presented a sensible system to help people figure out how best to manage (and enjoy!) food in their lives. It's not as clear to me they're doing that now.

I know that I found that after my first 40 pounds lost, I could no longer trust myself to eat as much fruit as I wanted and still lose. I never actually counted fruit as "points," but I did have to watch myself with it; obviously the fact that fruit has significant caloric value but no points was catching up to me. I imagine people who binge on lean proteins will run into similar problems with the new system.

On the bright side, if you're one of the lucky human beings who can successfully eat saturated fats and sugar without overeating, you'll probably find the reverse is true: I suspect that there isn't real evidence to back up the enormous penalties WW gives these foods on a caloric basis alone. My suspicion is that the real problem with eating high-sugar high-sat-fat foods is that they tend to make you overeat. I'm not saying I think WW is wrong to penalize these foods — the three pounds I put on last week with a friend's cookie party in the mix is evidence they're right — but still, I'm guessing that the numbers meant to nudge us toward better behavior could also end up misleading if we take them too slavishly.

In the end, I have faith WW is doing their best to present the best calculations to nudge us toward a sustainable relationship with food. That said, it's not a gameable system; it's a program you have to work at. There will be no shortcuts.

Put another way, although a look at the math of the new SmartPoints shows that, eating nothing but protein, I could take in nearly 6,000 calories a day and stay in my budget eating, I'm certain I would gain and gain fast doing that. In the end, though, that kind of absurd hypothetical is besides the point: the real value of points is how they interact with real people making real choices. It's too soon to tell how they work, but I can only hope SmartPoints will work out for the best.

Notes

[1] If you want to get this right, sit down with a spreadsheet and the WW calculator, but here's my initial formula rounded to two significant figures -- all nutrients are in grams:

0.24*Sugar + 0.55*Saturated Fat + 0.27 * (Fat-Sat Fat) + 0.12 * (Carb - Sugar) + 0.024 * Protein + Alcohol * 0.18.

Note, it was pointed out in the comments that someone said you should be able to calculate the points from calories, sat fat, sugar and protein alone. Indeed, you can get very close. The following formula is, in my tests, slightly less accurate but perfectly serviceable:

(0.0305 * calories) - (0.098*protein) + (0.12*sugar)+(0.275*sat fat)

[2] If you're curious how I calculated an "average" calorie, here's what I did. At first I thought I'd just average out the points-per-100cal values, but that's not really fair since you shouldn't eat equal amounts of all those nutrients. So I looked up recommended dietary intake at the Mayo Clinic and used those recommendations to put together these numbers:

	Sugar Val	Sat Fat Val	Non-Sat-Fat Val	Non-Sugar Carb	Protein	Fiber
Recommended calories	100	171	378	1288	448	31
Recommended Grams	25	19	42	322	112	31

Of course that's a full man's diet -- far less than someone trying to lose weight eats -- but nonetheless it still gives me the proportions I needed to calculate out a weighted average number of points-per-100 calories. Another important note is that to do this rigorously, I would have had to try to take into account the weight of 0-points foods — all those calories from fruits and carrots and squash we're not counting here. There wasn't a simple way for me to go from the Mayo Clinic recommendations to calculating how many calories we all should be taking in in "zero points" ways each day, so I didn't bother trying.

Point Density with the new SmartPoints

So I've written before about my preference for thinking about points in terms of densities. With the shift to SmartPoints today, my main concern was whether my point-density fudging would work. Specifically, I like knowing that for most of what I eat, the point densities can be estimated as either 0 (spinach, fruit, etc) or 1 (potatoes, pasta, lean proteins).

I took some time to go through all my old tables of point values and update them for SmartPoints and the result is that for the food I eat most of the time, my old tricks work. If you follow my instructions for a 1 PPV-density on-the-fly pasta-or-grain salad, it still works fine. As a rule, you'll see that lean proteins, especially fish, come out as winners here, mostly because the fats in those proteins get penalized less. Nonetheless, at reasonable portion sizes, those changes will often amount to no more than a point, so your old estimates will probably work just fine.

The thing that quickly emerges from the point densities are that prepared foods get hit -- assume at least a 1-point-per-ounce increase for most prepared foods -- and that sugar and butter get hit hard, which is bad news in Christmas Cookie season. The points-density of sugar and butter have nearly doubled, which means that for a typical cookie, the points will have nearly doubled as well.

I've broken down the points in more detail by categories below. Enjoy!

Real Food:
For real food, the change doesn't seem too bad. Here are the charts I used to justify my guestimate per-ounce calculations, with conversion into smart points.

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)	Smart Points (value of 1 oz)
Most Fruits & Vegetables	0	0
Potato, baked	1 (0.67)	1 (0.76)
Egg	1 (1.03)	1 (1.13)
Cooked pasta	1 (0.99)	1 (1.09)
Rice (brown or white)	1 (0.79,0.83)	1 (0.9, 0.92)
Hamachi (raw yellowtail)	1 (0.97)	1 (0.71)
Chicken breast - meat only	1 (1.05)	1 (0.63)
Pork chop, cooked lean	1 (1.15)	1 (1.01)
Swordfish	1 (1.17)	1 (0.97)
Salmon	1 (1.45)	1 (1.34)
Cooked pasta	1 (0.99)	1 (1.09)
Bread	2 (1.68)	2 (2.21)
Chicken thigh - meat only	2 (1.65)	1 (1.03)
Pork Ribs, country style	2 (1.98)	2 (2.10)
Pork Sausage	2 (2.48)	3 (2.94)
Cheese	3 (3.04)	4 (4.32)
Bacon, cooked crisp	3 (3.41)	4 (4.08)

The result is that for the foods that should make up most of your eating, there's not that big a big difference. For indulgences, the penalty is bigger.

Category	PPV	SmartPoints
Fruits and vegetables	0	0
Cooked starches/grains & lean protein	1	1
Fatty meat	2	2-3
Cheese & Really fatty meat	3	4
Butter & oil(2)	6	8-10

There was some talk in my meeting about big differences among the oils, but I'm not seeing them. Here are a few fats in the new SmartPoints:

Olive Oil	9 (8.71)
Canola Oil	8 (8.10)
Butter	10 (9.99)
Safflower Oil	8 (7.96)

The one thing I should note here is that in general proteins are "cheaper" in this new system, and the relative penalties or benefits of the more healthful choice are exaggerated. For example, the difference between yellowtail and pork sausage (fatty fish vs. fatty meat) used to be 0.97 vs. 2.48. Now that difference is 0.7 vs. 2.94. That means that 3 ounces of Yellow Tail now comes in at a mere 2 PPV, undercutting my 1 point rule-of-thumb for lean protein, and the pork sausage needs to be estimated at a solid 3 points per ounce with 3 ounces coming in at 9 rather than 8 points. That said, for a reasonable portion, your errors are within a point, so I'd say you could do worse than to say you can estimate points the same for everything but your fats, for which you have to learn new rules of thumb (4-points-per-ounce for cheese, 9 for oil, 10 for butter).

Baking Ingredients:
For those who cook food themselves, here are the key points-contributors of home-made treats. You'll see that the big changes here are for butter and sugar, which have almost doubled in value. That's going to have a big impact on cookies, pie, etc.

Food	PPV Density (value of 1 oz)	SmartPoints Density
Butter	6	10 (9.99)
Sugar	3 (3.26)	7 (6.67)
Flour, white	3 (2.56)	3 (2.83)
Flour, whole wheat	2 (2.42)	3 (2.54)

Prepared Foods 
For prepared foods, you could do worse than to say, take your old estimates, and add a point with the new system. Here's my summary with PPV compared with Smart Points -- some more specific data follows below.

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)	Smart Points
Dry snack foods	3	4
Dry greasy or sugary snack foods	4	5
Bready stuff	2	2
Cakey stuff	3	5

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Baked Good	Point Density (value of 1 oz)	Smart Points
Chocolate Chip Cookie (homemade)	3 (3.42)	5 (5.10)
Brownie (prepared)	3 (3.43)	5 (5.18)
Apple Pie (prepared)	2 (2.06)	3 (2.94)
Cheesecake (prepared)	2 (2.4)	2 (1.783)
Chocolate cake w/ frosting	3 (3.09)	5 (5.01)

Snack Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)	Smart Points
Popcorn, light	3 (2.85)	3 (2.73)
Multigrain Cheerios	3 (2.71)	4 (3.73)
Corn Flakes	3 (2.79)	3 (3.12)
Frosted Flakes	3 (2.81)	5 (4.57)
Saltine Crackers	3 (3.08)	4 (3.43)
Animal crackers	3 (3.40)	4 (4.32)
Tortilla Chips	4 (3.62)	4 (4.22)
Cheetos Puffs	4 (4.11)	5 (4.88)
Potato Chips	4 (4.24)	5 (4.75)
Milano cookies	4 (4.39)	6 (6.33)
Edy's Slow Churned Caramel Ice Cream	1 (1.32)	2 (2.44)
Premium Ice Cream	2 (2.06)	3 (3.45)
Pound cake	3 (3.12)	5 (5.08)

Lifetime

So today marks six weeks since I reached goal, which means, in WW parlance, that I've reached "lifetime" status — the bribe of free membership with which WW hopes to tempt me to stay at or under my goal weight (I set my goal weight at the top end of the healthy BMI range, which is the highest WW allows; I may well decide to lose more weight, but I see no need to pay WW any more money than I have to).

Here are some of my big take-aways:

It's not about exercise, really

When you drop 70 pounds, a good percentage of people will say something to you. Most of those people say something like, you look more active or you look like you've been working out more. That's almost certainly just politeness, but still, I think it reveals an assumption that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories. I've never found that to be true. I remember one summer in college running every day and methodically tracking my stats: weight, heart beat, and running time. Want to guess which number didn't move a bit? Weight.

My main way to get regular exercise in my life is biking to work when I can, but that's much harder to do in the winter, which let me discover something: last Spring, after not biking all winter but losing 30 pounds or so, the weather warmed up enough to let me start biking again. I was prepared to be winded since I was out of practice, but lo and behold I started moving significantly faster than I had, and having to breathe much less hard to do it. With those pounds off, biking was more pleasurable and it was easier to get back in the groove.

In short, exercise alone didn't help me lose weight, but losing weight did help me exercise more.

I'm not saying exercise isn't part of healthy living — obviously tons of evidence says that it is. It's also clear there's a feedback loop connecting weight and activity, where getting heavier makes it harder to be active and being less active makes you heavier.

That said, change is hard, and changing lots of things is very hard. I remember at one of my first meetings my leader said to me to focus on one change at a time. For me, focusing on food was much easier than focusing on exercise — after all, I love food, and I love geeking out about the make-up of food (see my post on points-density).

Now that I'm down 70 pounds from where I started, am I more active? Absolutely. Am I ready to look for more ways to get exercise into my life regularly? Yes, that too. But if I'd started this journey by trying to make myself get out there and run, I'm positive it wouldn't have gone nearly as well.

More is less

If there's one thing WW effectively taught me, and taught me quickly, it was that I could eat more, a lot more. Before WW, I usually skipped lunch, tried to limit meals, and inevitably found myself gaining weight anyway. It's not rocket science how I did it — I'm sure if I could follow my past self now I could easily point at where I picked up the extra calories, but the bigger point is this: trying to skimp on food was counterproductive, and I never realized a bigger issue: in spite of eating what I thought was a balanced diet, I was eating nowhere near enough food to keep me full. 

Before my meeting today I left the farmer's market holding 3-4 times the produce of what I used to buy, and far more than nearly anyone I saw around me — three of four bunches of greens, a couple of eggplant, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, a dozen and a half peaches or so and a half a dozen apples. 

WW bribes you into eating these foods by charging "0 points" for them — they're “free” in terms of your food tracking — and that is a huge incentive to start filling up on more vegetables. That's a big part of how it is that I was able to stop skipping lunch, eat bigger breakfasts, and lose weight on the whole.

Accountability & Community Matter

It shouldn't shock me as an educator that just knowing that someone else is keeping track of something helps me stay accountable, but it does. I've gone to a WW meeting nearly every Tuesday night for almost 2 years. 

There is very little I can really say I've learned at that meeting, but knowing I'll be weighing in before the meeting and knowing I'll connect with the group makes a big difference. It probably also helps to talk about food and eating each week, but the topics are all things I knew, and things I imagine most everyone in the room already knows.

The substance of the meeting is really beside the point; it's the routine of going that helps you keep your goal in mind and remember that it's achievable

Change is slow

One of the things that makes me most hopeful about where I'm at is how slowly the weight came off. Except for my first week, there weren't any weeks where I lost more than five pounds, and there were very few months where I lost ten. A normal week was maintaining my weight or losing somewhere between a half and two pounds.

Here's the graph of my progress over nearly two years. 

It looks steady on this graph, which is perhaps what made me able to stick with it, but it is dauntingly slow. In any given six-week window, it felt like crawling towards the next 5 or 10 pound mark. 

A few notes on the last few weeks of getting to "lifetime":

1. It was harder than I expected to maintain over the last six weeks, perhaps because it's been summer break. I feel a bit like a loser having done a fair bit of gaming the system to keep my weight down before the meeting (skimping on food and water the day of the weigh-in, biking in without a water bottle so I'd be even more dehydrated), but I imagine that's par for the course. I suppose my next goal is to be able to have a normal day and go to meeting stress-free before final weigh-in, with enough of a cushion that I'm not at risk of getting pushed back into have-to-pay-again territory.
2. It was exciting & embarrassing to get the little charm in front of the group. As an educator, I'm pretty strongly against rewards as bribes and I always bristle at stickers and reward charts in classrooms. That said, WW uses rewards as recognition all along the journey, with charms for 5% and 10% weight loss and for big milestones like 20 and 50 pounds.
   
   It's made me think about how exactly it is that rewards motivate people. Obviously getting a little 10 cent charm is not inherently very motivating, so it's not clear why having the charms should be helpful, but the fact of the award itself matters. This kind of reward is not really a bribe since I have no inherent interest in stupid little charms, but it is effective.

Cooking with Point Density in Mind

Given how much simpler life is using easy-to-estimate point densities, I've taken to thinking about cooking in terms of point densities as well. By making my meals come out with a PPV-density close to one, I'm able to portion my lunches simply by weighing. All year, I've worked w/ a 6-PPV lunch(1), for example, which is as simple as weighing my leftovers into 6-ounce portions and grabbing one for lunch. Easy, right?

At its simplest, aiming for a PPV-density of 1 means starting w/ foods with a density of 1 in the first place. For example, let's say I'm throwing together a pasta salad in the summer. I start adding foods with a PPV-density of 1: chicken breast, ham, pasta, etc. For these foods, no weighing is necessary: I'm aiming for the dish to have a density of one, and these ingredients have that density. Simple enough, right?

Now let's say I want to add some cheese at a PPV density of 3. To do so, I just hit tare on the scale and add as much cheese as I want, keeping track of the weight. Let's say I put in 2 ounces of cheese. In order to hit my target PPV-density of 1, I will have to offset the 2 ounces of cheese w/ 4 ounces of 0 PPV foods: tomatoes, celery, spinach, whatever.

I can use a similar method for adding Olive Oil. If I put in 2 Tbs. of olive oil, that's 6 points/1 ounce. To get back to my density of 1, I'll need to add another 5 ounces of PPV neutral foods. Hit tare and start adding. I might start with balsamic vinegar, which I want in my dressing anyway, then throw in some more greens, peppers, whatever's in the fridge.

The beauty of this as opposed to following is a recipe is that:

1. I can use whatever's in the fridge.
2. I don't get more than one bowl dirty — no extra implements to measure with.
3. I can still adjust flavors and balances as I go — if it needs more oil, I add it, I just have to offset it with 0-PPV foods at a 5:1 ratio.
4. When I'm done I have something I can keep in the fridge and eat as much as I want while knowing points — weighing the dish will give me the PPV value and I'm done.

I suppose if you wanted to, you could write the recipe for my summertime pasta salad as follows:

Tom's Pasta/Grain Salad Recipe: 1 PPV per Ounce
Lean protein	as much as you want, no need to measure.
Pasta (or rice or couscous or whatever grain you prefer)	as much as you want, no need to measure.
Cheese	Measure and offset with veggies at a 2:1 ratio
Oil	Measure and offeset with veggies/vinegar at a 5:1 ratio
Seasoning	Up to you: adjust the flavor profile any way you like.

If you prefer real recipes, it would be easy to make up variants of this by filling in the gaps(2), but to me the whole joy is in being able to improvise & then know the PPV of the food when I'm done w/ as little measurement as possible. Again, what I want in the end is the ability to weigh my plate and have the number of points I'm eating show up on the scale.

Other cooking can be done in terms of point density as well, though anything that gets cooked gets complicated, since cooking removes weight, which complicates matters.

For baking, for example, ultimately you're much better thinking in terms of items (slices, cookies, etc.) and estimating, since any calculations you do in terms of PPV-density just give you the density of the dough.(3)
Nonetheless, if you find this kind of thing fun and improvise as you bake, it's not a terrible idea to learn the PPV-densities of flour and sugar as well. (4)

Notes

1. I should mention that a 6 oz. lunch on its own is not filling enough: you have to supplement with 0PPV-foods. For me, I typically dress salad with just salt + vinegar, which means I can have as much salad as I want at 0PPV. I also pack fruit, carrot sticks, mini peppers, and whatever other veggies I have on hand. (back)

2. For those who prefer recipes, here are a couple that will end w/ a PPV-density of 1.

	Generic Template	Chipotle Couscous Salad	Pasta Salad w/ Italian Dressing
Lean protein	as much as you want, no need to measure.	3/4 c. chopped grilled chicken breast, generously salted, ideally flavored w/ an adobo rub or something like that; 1 can black beans	1/4 c. sliced ham + 1/4 c. sliced chicken breast + 1/4 c. kalamata olives
Pasta (or rice or couscous or whatever grain you prefer)	as much as you want, no need to measure.	2 cups couscous	2 cups butterfly noodles
Cheese	Measure and offset with veggies at a 2:1 ratio	1 oz. jack cheese + 2 oz. chopped tomatoes	1 oz. smoked mozzarella + 1 oz. baby spinach + 1 oz. chopped tomatoes
Oil	Measure and offeset with veggies/vinegar at a 5:1 ratio	1 Tbs. (1/2 oz) EVOO + 1 tsp. canned chipotle pepper + 2 tsp. balsamic vinegar (1/2 oz total) + 2 oz. mix of scallions+cilantro+spinach+bell pepper	1 Tbs. EVOO + 1 oz. balsamic vinegar + 1 oz. mix of celery + bell pepper + cucumber
Seasoning	Up to you: adjust the flavor profile any way you like.	Salt, cumin to taste	Fresh oregano, basil, parsley; salt & pepper to taste

(back)

3. Baked Good Densities are as follows:

Baked Good	Point Density (value of 1 oz)
Chocolate Chip Cookie (homemade)	3 (3.42)
Brownie (prepared)	3 (3.43)
Apple Pie (prepared)	2 (2.06)
Cheesecake (prepared)	2 (2.4)
Chocolate cake w/ frosting	3 (3.09)

In short: you could skip all the calculations as you bake, weigh your baked good, multiply by 3, and call it a day without being too far off. (back)

4. Ok, I'm crazy enough I learned the PPV-densities of basic baking ingredients anyway and sometimes try to use them to calculate points on the fly, but I'm highly unusual in that (1) I think this kind of thing is fun (2) I like to improvise as I bake. In case you're like me, here's the info I use:

Baking ingredient densities

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)
Butter	6
Sugar	3 (3.26)
Flour, white	3 (2.56)
Flour, whole wheat	2 (2.42)

If you can stomach multiplying by 2 ½, that's a better estimate for flour.
Some basic recipes come out like this then:

1. Bread = 5:3 (flour:water), or ~13 points / 8 oz. dough (using 2 ½) or an average point density of 1.6, before baking
2. Pie Crust = 3:2:1 (flour:butter:water), meaning (3*2.5+2*6+0)/6 or 20 points/6 oz. dough or a point density of ~3.
3. Shortbread cookie = 1:2:3 (butter:sugar:flour), meaning (1*6)+(2*3)+(3*2.5)=>20 points / 6 oz. dough or a point density of ~3.

As you can see, baking is probably the point where you're better off just looking up an equivalent food for an estimate, or doing the calculations precisely if you want to since you have the ingredient list and you're measuring anyway. (back)

Point Density

For me, doing weight watcher's well is pretty much impossible without doing a fair amount of tracking. Given that, any system that makes tracking easier — or that makes faking it easier when meticulous tracking is untenable — is a huge boon. Learning to weigh my food and think in terms of point densities has been just such a system.

A lot of people seem to think weighing your food is a lot of work, but it doesn't have to be. Putting a scale under your plate doesn't get any extra dishes dirty and it doesn't require any extra steps (you were already going to serve yourself, right?). As I'll explain below, for most foods that "count" towards your PPV target for the day, simply weighing the food in ounces would be a pretty good estimate for how many points you're eating. So if you're going to get lazy about tracking, you could do worse than to weigh all the non-veggies on your plate and keep track of that number.

I got to this lazy method of tracking after months of carefully tracking every item I ate. I was already enough of a geek chef to know that measuring weight is superior to measuring volume, so it didn't take me long to start weighing all of my food.

There's a thing that happens when you weigh ingredients as a cook where you realize that the density of nearly all food is 1 (that's because so much food is actually made of water). Well, it turns out that a similar rule applies to weighing food for Weight Watchers: the PPV-density of an enormous number of foods (specifically: foods with a heft to them similar to that of water) is also 1:

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)
Most Fruits & Vegetables	0
Potato, baked	1 (0.67)
Egg	1 (1.03)
Cooked pasta	1 (0.99)
Rice (brown or white)	1 (0.79,0.83)
Hamachi (raw yellowtail)	1 (0.97)
Chicken breast - meat only	1 (1.05)
Pork chop, cooked lean	1 (1.15)
Swordfish	1 (1.17)
Salmon	1 (1.45)
Cooked pasta	1 (0.99)
Bread	2 (1.68)
Chicken thigh - meat only	2 (1.65)
Pork Ribs, country style	2 (1.98)
Pork Sausage	2 (2.48)
Cheese	3 (3.04)
Bacon, cooked crisp	3 (3.41)
Butter	6 (5.83)

These are approximations, but not by all that much in many cases. For the amounts we eat, the difference between the estimates shown here and the actual number (in parentheses) is likely to amount to a single PPV, if it amounts to anything at all: at any rate, since the errors don't consistently work in any given direction, it's likely to be a wash.(1)

And the real advantage is that I've actually learned to think of food densities in a much simpler way, like this:

Fruits and vegetables	0
Cooked starches/grains & lean protein	1
Fatty meat	2
Cheese & Really fatty meat	3
Butter & oil(2)	6

If you eat mostly real, non-processed food(3), this cheat sheet + a scale will let you pretty much tally up your foods all simply by placing a scale under your plate and hitting tare each time you add something in a different point density category. Since much of what you eat belongs in the density 1 column anyway, you might not even have to hit tare between items: just weigh your lean proteins and grains and the number on the scale (in ounces) is a pretty good approximation of the number of points. Done.

This also helps with unfamiliar foods. Cooking polenta? You're probably safe approximating a density of 1. Tortilla? It's about as moist as bread, so let's assume a density of 2. Reheating left over mac&cheese from Panera? You could do worse than to assume a PPV-density of 2 (right between cheese & noodles) though it's likely not actually as bad as ½ cheese ½ noodles. (4)

I should point out that one consequence of this is that many of the differences between healthy and less healthy food start to evaporate: brown rice vs. regular rice, pasta vs. lean protein — on this chart, they don't seem to make any difference.

That said, I think a little time experimenting with tracking your food will tell you how a meal affects you in terms of satiety. All points are not equal, and we all know that if you eat foods that don't fill you up, you will find a way to eat later to make up for the difference, and often not a good way.
Also, lest you think that the points system is not likely to lead to healthy choices, it's worth remembering the enormous incentive WW provides to eat 0-points food. If you're trying to fill a plate, its clear that any way you slice it, tracking points is going to incentivize you to fill up with fruits & veggies.

Notes

1. Imagine, for example, a dinner plate with a 5 oz. serving of pork chops, a 6 oz. serving of brown rice, and some steamed vegetables with a tablespoon of butter (1/2 ounce). The quick estimate says this is a 14 point meal. If we go back and calculate it more carefully, we get 4.74 points for the brown rice, 5.75 points for the pork, and 2.92 for the butter, for a total of 13.415 points, which WW would round up to 14 anyway — same difference. The point is, even with some of our foods that seem like the "1" estimate is more inaccurate, it tends to not matter overall when you add up the overall points.

2. Note that most oils have a density higher than 6 since, unlike butter, they don't have any milk solids or proteins getting in the way of the fat. That said, oil is one of the few ingredients I actually typically measure by volume instead of by weight since I'm often adding it either to a pan or to a salad (which I don't weigh since it's all value 0). Given that, the fact that oil is significantly lighter than water means that the 6 approximation is much more accurate for a fluid ounce than for a regular old ounce.

3. As you can probably guess, many processed foods break both the rule of thumb that the actual density of foods is 1 and my WW corollary that the PPV-density of most foods is 1PPV/ounce. I eat few enough processed foods that I tend to learn the servings and weigh them that way -- when I eat cereal I weigh it in grams, for example. Nonetheless, here's a quick table of PPV estimates for common processed ingredients:

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)
Popcorn, light	3 (2.85)
Multigrain Cheerios	3 (2.71)
Corn Flakes	3 (2.79)
Frosted Flakes	3 (2.81)
Saltine Crackers	3 (3.08)
Animal crackers	3 (3.40)
Tortilla Chips	4 (3.62)
Cheetos Puffs	4 (4.11)
Potato Chips	4 (4.24)
Milano cookies	4 (4.39)
Edy's Slow Churned Caramel Ice Cream	1 (1.32)
Premium Ice Cream	2 (2.06)
Pound cake	3 (3.12)

It seems like we could simplify this to something like this:

Food	Point Density (value of 1 oz)
Dry snack foods	3
Dry greasy or sugary snack foods	4
Bready stuff	2
Cakey stuff	3

4. Actual PPV values: Polenta: 1 (0.66), Tortilla: 2 (2.22), Panera Mac & Cheese 1 (1.13). The Panera number is pretty low, so I'm a bit skeptical: it looks like what might be going on is that Panera Mac & Cheese is actually super-dense: I'll note that WW puts a cup at 10 points and 246 grams -- with a real density higher than water (1.08). I'll be honest and say I've always estimated prepared mac&cheese at 1.5 or 2 depending on how generous I'm being with myself on a given day. A quick check of the WW database shows that for Papa Gino's Mac & Cheese, 2 is the more accurate estimate (1.58 to be precise).